Natasha Piano, Democratic Elitism: The Founding Myth of American Political Science
2025-06-10
All a political system needs to be democratic, according to this minimal definition, is competitive elections. Where does this understanding of democracy come from? The standard story says from two Italian thinkers, Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca, who inspired the German Robert Michels, who inspired the Austrian Joseph Schumpeter, who brought it across the Atlantic to the United States when he took a job at Harvard.